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Articles

Stable-master Developer Diary

By DrOctothorpe

We know that our Middle-earth is a big place and that sometimes getting around can be a bit perplexing. While we love the visual appeal of our world map, there can be times you want to understand where you’ve been and where you want to go.

•Not sure if you ever made it to The Wold in your run of Rohan? We’ve got you covered.

•Wondering exactly where Maur Tulhau is and what it connects to? Yeah, you can do that.

•Wish to simply admire the clean constellation of places you have quested and explored on a single map? Here you go.

•And of course, if you’ve just got to go there now, you can do that, too.

Think of this Collection as the map on your wall over your desk, a push-pin for every stable found.

But let’s back up for a moment. You may have noticed the Collections system quietly growing in its corner of our UI over the last several updates. With the recent Emotes Collection we felt like we were starting to hit our stride. As we began looking around for other information that would be cool and interesting to show, we hit on the idea of Stable-masters, and we immediately knew we were on to something different.

Pro tip: you can search by region name as well as by stable-master location name.

Furthermore, the idea of showing all discoverable stable-masters provided a reason to try something several of us had been itching to do for a while: portray the full map of Lord of the Rings Online, in its actual game-world proportions, laid out over the greater landmass of Middle-earth. This meant going in and getting the computer equivalent of aerial snapshots of every region, then stitching them together. Once stitched, we were able to forge an artistic rendering that, if we do say so ourselves, looks pretty all right.

But enough about how and why. Let’s talk a bit about what the Stable-master Collection is. Well, to begin with, there are just over 150 stable-master locations in Lord of the Rings Online (and counting, of course), and they paint a pretty great map of where you’ve been and what you’ve done.